Share this

Transformation Garden - Jan. 9, 2013

Today’s Text of Encouragement:

“Delight yourself also in the Lord, and He will give you the desires and secret petitions of your heart. Commit your way to the Lord, roll and repose each care of your load on Him! Trust, lean on, rely on, and be confident also in Him and He will bring it to pass.”
Psalm 37: 4, 5
Amplified Bible

Today’s Text for Study:

“Then You’ll get real worship from us, acts of worship small and large, including all the bulls they can heave onto Your altar!”
Psalm 51: 19
The Message Bible

EXPLORATION

“Why God Loved David” – Part XXVII

“Open wide the windows of our spirits and fill us full of light; open wide the door of our hearts, that we may receive and entertain Thee with all our powers of adoration.”
Christina Rosetti
Author Unknown

After studying Psalm 51 and reading David’s heartfelt message to his Father, how do I feel about my heavenly Father’s love and mercy?

What encouragement do I gain from Psalm 51 when I ask for my Father’s forgiveness?

“We should dedicate ourselves to becoming in this life the most perfect worshipers of God we can possibly be, as we hope to be through all eternity.”
Brother Lawrence

INSPIRATION

“God is not moved or impressed with our worship until our hearts are moved and impressed by Him.”
Kelly Sparks

Today we come to the last verse in Psalm 51. While I realize it has taken us some time, as we have studied this beautiful chapter, I hope and pray your heart has been encouraged by the evidence of David’s sorrow for his sin and the transformative way his heavenly Father reached into David’s life to re-establish the close ties that once held them together.

Please remember, the heavenly change that occurred in David’s life was not because of anything David did, except to come to his Father, dirty, grubby, sins and all! And come to God he did! For I ask you, “When we’ve messed up royally, who else will accept us as we are and turn us into something we never imagined we could be?”

This is what happened in David’s life when we find in Psalm 51: 1, that David first asked his Father to, “Have mercy upon me, O God, according to Thy loving kindness: according unto the multitude of Thy tender mercies blot out my transgression.”

David’s plea was for a messed-up life as a hopeless failure to be transformed, not because David deserved any special favors or hoity-toity treatment because of his position as king of Israel. Instead, David appealed to what he knew his Father was like – merciful, kind, gracious, and long-suffering. It was God, Himself, in the presence of one of His earthly friends, Moses, who I might also add was a murderer, that God “descended in the cloud and stood with (Moses) and proclaimed the name of the Lord. And the Lord passed by before him (Moses), and proclaimed, ‘The Lord, The Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin’” (Exodus 34: 5-7 K.J.V.).

Whenever I need a reminder from my heavenly Father’s mouth about what He is like – how loving and kind He is; how patient He is with me; how understanding of my failings – all I do is go to Exodus 34: 5, 6 and read what my Father tells me He is like – it’s a fabulous “memory refresher!”

From the first verse of Psalm 51, where the penitent David appeals to God for mercy, we come to the last verse and find in Psalm 51: 19, there’s a new spring in David’s step! Something has changed. And now David, cleansed and forgiven, with the broken and burned walls of his life restored, begins to talk about worship, adoration and glory – not for himself – but for his “Restorer.” I found great implications for my own life as I read these words penned by William Temple regarding true worship which quickens the conscience by the holiness of God. Here’s what he wrote:

“To worship is…to feed the mind with the truth, to purge the imagination by the beauty of God, to open the heart to the love of God, to devote the will to the purpose of God.”

Doesn’t this describe what we find happened in David’s life – a conversion took place. In the Hebrew, we studied that the word “convert,” used in Psalm 51: 13 means, “to return to the starting point.” God gave David a “do-over.” In the New Testament Greek, the word “convert” means, “to turn around.” What an appropriate description of David, for with God’s power infusing his life, he turned around and rather than run away from the whole-heart worship of his Father, Psalm 51: 19 reveals to us that David told his Father that the great longing of his life was to come and worship God, holding nothing back. This is why I used The Message Bible today for our study text because the descriptive language it contains creates such a wonderful image: “You’ll get real worship…including all the bulls they can heave onto Your altar!” One might consider the word “ALL” to be a little exaggeration on David’s part. I don’t think so. I believe David wanted to make it perfectly clear to His Father that all meant all. He wasn’t going to hold any part of himself back from worshipping God anymore. God had ALL of him. As one author wrote: “True worship exalts God to His rightful place in our lives.” Or as Herbert M. Carson so beautifully acknowledged: “Worship is the declaration by a creature of the greatness of his Creator.”

Psalm 51: 1 begins where we read David’s cry for mercy, but I find that by the last verse of Psalm 51 the truth in the words of Oswald Milligan ring loud and clear, “Worship…is giving to the Lord the glory that is due in response to what He has revealed to us and done to us in Jesus Christ His Son.”

“Here might I stay and sing,
No story so divine;
Never was Love, dear King,
Never was grief like Thine!
This is my Friend,
In whose sweet praise
I all my days
Would gladly spend.”

Samuel Crossman

AFFIRMATION

Based on Psalm 104

“”O worship the King, all glorious above.
Thy bountiful care, what tongue can recite?
It breathes in the air, it shines in the light;
It streams from the hills, it descends to the plain,
And sweetly distills in the dew and the rain.
Frail children of dust, and feeble as frail,
In Thee do we trust, nor find Thee to fail;
Thy mercies, how tender! How firm to the end!
Our Maker, Defender, Redeemer, and Friend!”

Robert Grant
(1779-1838)

“I will sing to the lord as long as I live; I will sing praise to my God while I have any being. May my meditation be sweet to him; as for me, I will rejoice in the Lord.”

P.S. So many of you have written me the past few weeks explaining how empty parts of your life feel right now. It may be the loss of a job, a house, or the death of a loved one. Many of you are suffering from the heartbreak of divorce and feeling empty because of love lost.

P.P.S. Just to let you know, Transformation Garden is now on FACEBOOK. Please come and see us and share the garden with your friends. The Daily Devotional is posted everyday, Monday through Friday on Facebook, too.

My book, When A Woman Meets Jesus, is available wherever books are sold and on the internet at www.amazon.com, and www.Christianbook.com, or by calling toll-free, 1-800-Christian. You may also call Transformation Garden at 480-281-1508.